Meet A Sound Storyteller

Greg Staffa 0:00

You're listening to the Staffa Corner Podcast, a Staffatarian look at entertainment in life with your host, Greg Staffa. On this episode of the Staffa Corner Podcast, I'm joined by George Flores, a Toronto-based supervising sound editor, sound designer, and re-recording mixer whose work spans film, television, and documentaries. George, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Have you always lived in Toronto? What was your upbringing like?

George Flores 0:55

Actually, I was born in Mexico City and I moved to Canada when I was 18 years old. So I've been in Canada for like a very, very, very long time, best part of my life, really. But I've been working with sound since I was 12 years old because I started playing guitar as a child. And then my father had a small tape recorder. So I, you know, off 13 years old, I started playing with a tape recorder. And once you hear yourself back, then that's it. You look for life. Uh, so I've made my life in sound ever since. Although throughout the years, I've obviously had out of the jobs uh because this is sort of a hard field to break in. But uh, it takes time, but with uh dedication and hard work, it certainly works.

Greg Staffa 1:40

Why not become a musician? What was it about sound that was so enticing to you that you didn't start you know a band or something like that? You focused on the sound aspect of it.

George Flores 1:51

Well, I did have the teenage band sort of thing, garage band going. Of course, that was part of the you know, the uh growing up at the time, uh, it was that sort of thing. But uh sound was always I was very, very interested in. And when I was maybe about maybe 15 or 16, I knew an older person, an older guy at the time that was making a short film. And I discussed with him what sort of sound we could use that was not music. And we talked about it, you know, there was all this okay, think-of-the-concept type of idea, and that's how this started becoming more and more interested in sound. Having said that, that short little film never got off the ground, but at least it gave me the beginnings of start thinking thematically in terms of what sound can bring to image.

Greg Staffa 2:44

And it is interesting the way that we kind of take for granted the sound mixing and and everything that goes into creating that for a feature film or a documentary or even a TV show of what that goes

When Sound Joins A Film

Greg Staffa 3:00

into. So let's say I have a feature film that I'm interested in doing, and I I I'm ready to start going on it. At what point in the project are you brought in?

George Flores 3:12

Well, normally, uh okay, this is normally I work with directors that I have worked with in the past. Um film, a new director, that sort of thing. But normally I work with directors that have worked with me previously. Therefore, there is always sort of a workflow and an understanding of how things will go. But really, I would always recommend to a director to get the sound designers, sound design people, creative people involved at the consulting stage of the script to see what will be needed to bring the film up. So samples is basically divided into two or three different elements. I mean, there's one big element, one big element that is technical, basically. When my current clients, I am brought in when pictures, and at which point I will just look at the picture and do everything that needs to be done, which is uh, you know, I cover all aspects of samples production. So five disciplines, dialogating, sound design, sound effects, music mixing, and final 5.1 output. And even after that, uh the fill up of the MEs and also as well the QC, like Lia song with QC. So I am usually brought up at picture lock.

Greg Staffa 4:24

And tell us a little bit about for people that don't understand or realize what uh a sound editor does. Can you walk us through the process of what kind of stuff can you do?

George Flores 4:36

Sure. So, okay, let's take it to the basics here. So a film is being shot and is being shot on locations, several locations perhaps, and they are using microphones on set to record the voices. And in this day and age, we're using radio microphones, lavalier microphones for all of the talent. Each person has their own microphone, plus a boom microphone, which is sort of a more traditional way of recording sound. So ideally, what happens is that you have in on each scene, you will have separated microphones. They're called isotracks, isolated tracks, in which you will have one channel will have the boom, then one different channel will have the lab for one of the actors, and the other channel will have the other lab for the other actor, assuming that we have two actors in a scene. So, in a situation like that, then we would have three usable isolated tracks, isolated channels of sound, which is the boom and the two labs. And because we're recording this on location with a digital recorder as this capturing of sound, the machine itself will create a stereo mix, which is really sort of a guide track. So if you extrapolate that as one scene, that's what happens. Let's stick that to the whole the whole movie. So then the editor, the video editor will put together all the scenes, whichever way they want to do them with the act with the director. And in my case, they will be cutting the sound into the ISOs. So they bring the isolated tracks into the video uh bay, and they will cut, they will nest them and they will cut the video to do that. Once that's done, the result is now we have a video, the picture locked, let's say it's not picture lock, of all the video, and it has all of the location sound, the isolated tracks. Then that is outputted to me to start post-production through something called AAF. The um that's just a term to transfer in sound. It's a software that is part of Pro Tools, uh, designed by Pro Tools, and then it comes to me, and all that does is that transfers all of the audio that you have on the edit bay or the video edit bay to me with the same time code. And a few things do come through, fades and panning, and some volumes come through. So that comes to me. At that point, I can start doing my work, and then what I ideally what I have is just the dialogue, just the dialogue. And it's probably full of noise, it probably has hits and bumps, and it hasn't been cleaned at all. So the first thing I do then is we have to clean the dialogue and create a usable clean dialogue track that can stand on its own without bumps and hits and noises or anything like that. And hopefully they recorded a room tone on the set. So we'll put it into filling up the gaps. If they didn't record the room tone, uh, although not ideal to today's world, we have a billion different options to get that done here in post-production. Then the bug is basically done, then we have to concentrate in creating the environments where the sound where the action takes place. So let's assume that the movie has a scene that is in a warehouse. Okay, so you want to create the sound of an empty warehouse, if in fact it's empty, an empty warehouse. Um, and that we can go to a location and record it, we can get it from a sound library, and that is a 5.1 environment, not 0.1, 5 environments, so it's around an immersive. So when we put the sound of the warehouse, just the empty tone of the warehouse there, and we put the dialogue on top, now we have something that starts to sound more realistic. But then we're missing all the footsteps, we're missing the foley, which is when actors move, maybe they light up a cigarette and the sound of the cigarette lighting, all that stuff has to be done too. So the steps are basically clean up all the dialogue, create all the create or source all of the atmospheres, the environmental sounds that need to be there, do all of the folly, which is mean, which means redo all of the sound that the actors that belongs to the actors, like flicking a pen, um, crunching a piece of paper, uh lighting up a cigarette, all that. The reason why we do that is because the voice recording is not concentrated on recording good quality for those sounds. They only care about the voice. Although sometimes we can use what's recorded on set. Then after that, we have to do the sound effects. So if they enter into the warehouse, maybe you want to hear the big door of the warehouse opening. So that's a sound that we will source, which will be through library or location sound, a sound effect of a door opening. And if we don't have the correct door, we can edit the sound, the sound effect itself to create a deeper door, put some more reverb on it and make it fit like the warehouse. And then after that is done, while I'm doing this, usually the composer is working with the director, creating a uh composing a track. So the track will come to me of the music composition, all fully done and approved by the director, at which point I will just put it in and start mixing the film.

Greg Staffa 10:03

I don't think people fully grasp what all goes into creating a film, and you described it so beautifully. So thank you for that. When you're dealing with those aspects of it from the fully to the sound effects, is that all under one department? Are these different departments that you have to work with, or are you all part of the same team? How is there any kind of clashes that go on as far as finding that right balance of this sound versus the dialogue? How does all that play into things?

George Flores 10:38

So, this

Indie Workflow Versus Hollywood

George Flores 10:40

also has to do with the workflow and the type of client and the type of budget that we're working with. I work with independent directors, they are not signed to big Hollywood uh companies, they don't have 20 million dollars for a film. These are independent artists that are creating film. It could be horror, it could be sci-fi, it could be drama, it could be anything. But it does what I work with. So I don't work with you know one of the big Hollywood things, uh big Hollywood companies. In Hollywood, because Hollywood is like a big bureaucracy, the way it happens is they'll make uh you know $200 million film and they'll hire a studio. They know who they are, they're down there, and that studio has several departments. They have a supervising sound editor, they have a dialogue editor, they have a sound effects editor, they have an ADR recording, they have everything. So they have a different person or a different department to address all the different needs for sound for a film. In my case, I do everything myself because my budgets are much, much lower. And personally, I enjoy working by myself a lot more than working with others. Um, it also makes it a lot more artistic, a lot more efficient, and I can be one-on-one with the director instead of saying, okay, well, let me ask the dialogue editor about that, or let me ask the sound effects editor about that. Since I've done everything, the director, I can communicate with them very, very efficiently. So this brings down the time that it takes to finish a feature film considerably. I mean, considerably, and of course, the cost is pennies compared to what Hollywood would charge. Because we're cutting away all of the middle management and all of the structure that feeds that big bureaucracy that does that. In terms of numbers of how like new people want to get into some post-production, if you think about uh just really what the possibilities are of getting jobs working in film, independent film is there's like millions of them being made every year, where there's comparably very, very few uh films that are like large budget films. So working with independent film, people that are starting out will have a lot better chance than actually work on it than actually trying to get a job in one of the largest studios. I mean, those jobs do happen, but it's just the numbers point out that working with independent film is a lot better. On top of that, we now have technology that was not available 20 years ago. It wasn't available 10 years ago. So things like dialogue editing, although it's still an art that you should know what you're doing and you should understand how it works from the very beginning, it is so much easier to do and so much faster to do than it when it was 15 or 20 years ago. Let me give you an example of that. 20 years ago, if you recorded a boom and a lab at the same time, and the boom is eight feet away from the lab, which the lab is attached to the actress' um chest, there would be an eight millisecond delay because the sound takes time to travel eight feet, which is where the boom would have been. So then the sound of the boom will be behind by about eight milliseconds, enough for your ear to discern that and know that something is not quite right. So back in the day, what we would do is by hand, we will take the sound of the boom and align it by hand by listening to it, by looking at the waveforms, and by pulling it a little bit to the left, it sounds exactly perfect and it makes sense. So in a feature film, that would have taken a long time to do. Today, the same process is literally one click on the button and it's done in like two minutes. So technology is certainly affecting the workflow and simplifying many things. The idea with technology is not to overuse it and not to replace what really the knowledge you would have. So being a knowledgeable person in any field, it could be color correction, it could be whatever, it doesn't really matter what it is, as long as you know the principle, the the basics very well, you can apply the technology without taking it to the end degree. So this is what defines uh the difference between a good artist and a person that is just a hacker that just says, okay, push a button, the noise, and then it sounds all like watery and monkeys and kind of weird, right? So that's really what we have now. So technology is making also making our jobs a lot easier by the same in the same speech saying the same thing. Directors 20 years ago, 15 years ago, would probably have to go into a video studio, sit there with the video editor, and work with them for three months or whatever it was to make a feature film. Most directors I work with, not all of them, but most of them, got the videos themselves. Because now it's you can do it in your bedroom. So things have changed a lot, and we have to adapt to stay to stay competitive.

Organic Sound And Overcleaning

Greg Staffa 15:55

Interesting. Which do you find personally more challenging? A scene that's filmed in like a city versus a scene that maybe is filmed on a prairie landscape.

George Flores 16:08

It it really depends what the artistic direction of the of the film is. Because a film that is short in a city, if I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe it's one of those uh you know police films, or maybe it's a crime film or something like that, or even if it's like a love scene, people walking and talking, the city itself has an organic sound that needs to be in the picture, right? So perhaps that is just doesn't require that much cleaning or removing sounds or whatever, where perhaps the one in the in the um in the paris uh in the fields may require a different treatment. So that is all a bit of the art of it. What approach do you want to do? And one of the things you see today is that a lot of the films and a lot of the films you watch on streaming are incredibly overly cleaned. There's reasons why people overdo it, and sometimes I'm forced to overdo it too, because sometimes quiety control will say you have to remove that little tiny little click that is there, even if it's a footstep. We don't care, remove it. So it depends, it depends. There's not one that is easier than the other. Now, the ones that I would say could be more difficult, well, more engaging to do would be like a documentary. Because in a real documentary, you do not want to overdo anything and you don't want to edit and you don't want to change what people are saying. So that you have to be careful to respect what was there.

Greg Staffa 17:37

The ABCs of what you do, does that process change between the two examples that I gave? Or is it always the approach is the same? The results might be different, but how you handle it or how you approach it and the steps you take are the same?

George Flores 17:55

Some of the steps are the same. In the example that I gave you, for example, of what's called the time aligning of microphones, the one microphone that is behind because it's far away, that would probably happen both in the city and the other one and the Paris as well. The basic cleaning, basic denoising uh continues because within the frequency spectrum of voice, of dialogue, there is between, you know, below 60 or 70 hertz, there's really no usable voice, vocal human sound. So we're gonna remove all that. So there's a filter that goes at the bottom of it and at the top as well, somewhere else. Uh, and that happens, doesn't matter where you are, right? So it doesn't matter that just because the human hearing and the human voice have the definite equalization systems, equalization areas that need to be addressed. And you do not want to have all this rumble and noise underneath, say 60, 70 hertz. A person with my voice probably can no 70 hertz, maybe, yeah, about that. But a female talking a bit, you know, maybe you can go up to 85, even 90 uh hertz sometimes and remove uh sound underneath that without you noticing that it you've done it.

Greg Staffa 19:13

You have a clear passion for what you do. It's uh it's hard not to tell how much you enjoy the sound and what you do, the technology, the terms. I mean, you know it all. Are you still able to go as a fan to watch something, or are you always kind of breaking it down as you're watching it, going, I would have done this or I would have done this differently, or this is how they did it?

George Flores 19:38

No, many times I do go and watch some things, but if something is obviously bad, I mean, oh my god, what do they do? Even if and then my wife will say, What? What happened? So, yeah, I mean, you you develop a bias, uh, obviously. Um, obviously. Um, but but yeah, I try to, I mean, I do I do enjoy some things that are like, you know, like watching watching all the movies and stuff. Actually, I you know, to be really, really upfront, I enjoy the older movies better than today's movies because its sound was more organic. And for some shows, like even if you look at a television show from the 70s or 80s, like take Colombo or what something like that, the organic sound is what makes that whole thing work. If you overclean that, it becomes just like awful. It's just not, it doesn't have the same, you know, this the same organic uh human factor to it. The same thing is with mash, those kind of shows. And what I missed many times in the newer newer shows is that they don't have any of that. It's all been super clean, uh laboratory clean, and then just new sound is being put on top, basically. And it kind of loses uh you know the organic

Building Volcanoes And Fake Reality

George Flores 20:55

part of it.

Greg Staffa 20:56

Is there anything that you've done that you're extremely proud of? I mean, you did a uh a thing on volcanoes, which I would have to imagine that sound is a lot different than anything else that you've done before. Yes. What are some of the biggest challenges that you face that you've gone back and now watched and said, I'm extremely proud of this or that? Is there anything out there that stands out?

George Flores 21:20

Yeah, I am I am I enjoying because I've been in it for such a long time, uh, I enjoy a lot of the sound design that is not traditional sound design. So I enjoy, for example, utilizing principles of sound design that are perhaps very old, like a music concrete, a lot more where I can actually design, manipulate, and create a particular sound that I may want to use for whatever scene it is, a lot more. That's a lot more enjoyable for me than grabbing a gun sound from a you know a library and just putting it in and putting weird voice. It so for me, the creation of sound, manipulation of sound, whether if it's something that I created myself or something that I got from a sound library or something that goes through a synthesizer or anything like that, is the creation of it that works. So the volcanoes you're talking about, that was an IMAS presentation, and it is an uh edutainment, educational entertainment. And while we're trying to replicate the sound as much as possible, this sound is all creating post. It doesn't exist. There is no location sound for it because, oh, if there is a minimal, because the camera people, the director goes up to these mountains, sometimes by himself, sometimes just a couple of other people. There are no batteries, there's no electricity, they don't have a sound crew. All they've got is maybe uh something attached to the camera. And if you're super lucky if they're interviewing somebody, a lab that goes into the camera as well. So that sound when it comes to post-production is basically nothing. It's just maybe like a little bit of you know the explosion of the volcano. So those particular sounds uh shows are fully recreated uh in post-production. It's everything's recreated in post-production. So in that one, uh, creating one of the explosions for one of the one of these uh volcanoes could have taken three or four days just to create like 40 seconds of this thing happening. And it's all a matter of manipulating sound to give it the depth, give it the distance, and make sure that it's actually feels like it's like it's real. So edutainment is done that way, uh, because they have a lot of limitations into what they can actually record, like on location, right? So, yeah, that's kind of how it goes.

Greg Staffa 23:51

I'm I'm always amazed. I've talked to some fully people, and some of the sounds that we hear are fictionalized, they they use other devices, other things to create the sounds that we hear. Just in your opinion, why is it that we have to fictionalize the sounds? Is there something about how we hear things that is that doesn't always register what's real versus what's not real?

George Flores 24:23

Okay, so I think here we have to kind of separate a couple of things. So, number one is there are sounds that I would consider to be reality sounds. Okay, the actor walks into a room, opens the door, and goes and talks to the girlfriend or whatever. That's kind of like a reality sound, that's kind of like the way the sound, the door would sound at that particular place. And it's a normal, a normal, a normal door, right? So if you compare that to another actor opening a vault that opens into the void of hell, or like some crazy thing full of monsters, then there's a big difference. The the vault type thing is probably gonna be a really thick, heavy metal door. And because it's opening to something that is non-realistic, maybe you want to have something that is super heavy, super thick, super bright. Perhaps that's the way to go on that one. But all this also comes down to what happens when this goes to the theater. Because in surround sound 5.1, which is really still the standard for most theaters. I mean, there are some theaters that are playing in Adam's, but really it's 5.1 is and maybe uh I'm asking some of the super big films. But in 5.1 at the theater, that is not designed to play back like the human ear in uh ear hears. Sound is sound playback in a typical 5.1 commercial theater, is not has nothing to do with reality. First of all, there's when you're listening to anything, birds on the street, you do not hear point source sound coming out of five different speakers. You you hear it all over the place, your ear hears all over the place. And in the 5.1, the 0.1 channel, which is a tenth of a channel because it's frequency reproduction, has been boosted up by 10 decibels so that when the Batman car comes in or the big spaceship comes in, the whole thing shakes and the whole theater, you know, and you feel the unimmersive, big, powerful sound. That is not how reality is. That's been faked by Hollywood for the last uh 50 years. So we as consumers have been trained to listen to that and accept it as reality, but that's not how we hear things. It's not, you know, not even close to how we hear things.

Greg Staffa 26:53

You have an amazing way of explaining

Teaching Sound And Speaking Director

Greg Staffa 26:55

things. I understand you do some teaching, is that correct?

George Flores 26:59

Yes, I've I've been teaching sound for about 10 years. I've taught at a few colleges here in Canada. I'm still doing some workshops, but I found that some of the curriculums for teaching were not satisfactory enough for me. Uh, and some of that has to do with that the technology, the appreciation of sound, and how we deal with things today have changed. And colleges sometimes have a hard time keeping up with these changes. They're still teaching stuff from 15, 20 years ago. If I make a course for somebody, I would not say you are going to be the second assistant dialogue editor. That's not gonna happen because that job doesn't exist anymore. Uh yeah, maybe if you work in in Hollywood in a $400 million movie, it'll be there, but that's not the student. It's not gonna, that student won't get there. They would even hire me, so they won't hire the student. So the idea is to give the information, to pass on information that is usable for the student so they can enter and be successful. It's good to understand how the chain of command works, but it's also, you know, we have to kind of keep up with the times. And whether we like it or not, we are in an age of technology and we use technology to the nth degree, and that is what's making what we have what we have. I mean, movies that I'm talking about, shows that like back in the 60s and 70s, they didn't even have radio microphones. One boom, basically, maybe two booms. Um, and it sounds good today, even still sounds good today. Today we have access to, I mean, in my system, I can do like 4,000 tracks or something. Who needs 4,000 tracks? Well, now, if I'm making monsters, maybe I do need 40 or 50 tracks to make one roar, just because I can do it, you know, is you're not limited by how much money you've got to do that or how much time you've got to do that, which is another really good thing I want to say is that the way I work, there is no time limit in what I do. So if I have to design a sound that is a mixture of uh roar of a tiger and a human or something, I can take as long as I need to create that. But if you work in on another studio, every hour is another 200. And if you want to spend a day doing it, well, that's another two grand or something like that. So this is why working on independent productions allows you to be very, very creative. Now, when I say there's no time limit, is because I know how long, before I take the job, I know how long it will take me to do it. That's only experience. It's just because I've done it so many times. Okay, yeah, I know what you want. No problem at all, right? Um, so it's also I teach a course, is uh introduction to some post-production for directors and producers. And that is basically to tell their some producers, yes, think of it this way, you know, be efficient, uh, be artistic, and have somebody communicate with one-on-one so that you can understand and they can understand what you want. Because directors do not speak sound, and sound people need to speak director dialogue. So when the director says, Oh, I want an ominous, chocolatey type of dark ethereal, you can have to take that into your brain and say, What is he talking about? And you have to then look at the picture and then come up with some suggestion for the director of his chocolate ethereal dark thing. So, yeah.

Greg Staffa 30:42

And you said you you started your love of sound because you had a little recorder that as a child you carried with you. As an adult, do you still carry a recorder with you? Are you always looking for sounds? Are you walking down the street and you hear something? You go, I need to record that.

George Flores 30:59

No, no, I don't do that anymore. Uh, I did it for a long time. I had a portable, you know, stereo, good quality recorder, but I don't do that anymore. I'm just not concentrating on post. I've got more than enough that I've received. But if I need something, and case in point, I'm working in a movie right now, and if it was the it's the fall, and they had a lot of wind on the trees. Uh, and right now, here in Canada, it's the fall, so in the fall, and there's lots of wind. So in my backyard, I have all these big trees. So I actually yesterday I went there and recorded the wind on the trees for that, because I thought it would be more accurate than what I have on a sound library. So from time to time I will do that, and also I will do some foli that needs to be done, but not always. It all depends what it is, right? Like, for example, I had a uh short, it was a short film actually from one of the students. Uh, I think it was two years ago or something like that, where the actor was peeling an apple. There's no way you can use a sound library to peel an apple with with a knife. You have to actually follow it. So things like that are totally have to be followed. But something like putting a uh a cup down a table, that you don't have to follow that. It's probably it's probably thousands of those sounds available on online. Or well, you know, in sound libraries.

Greg Staffa 32:19

Is there anything out there that as a sound person you would just love the opportunity to work on? Is there a genre? Is there a certain thing that you would just love to work on, or is sound just a passion and it doesn't matter what you're doing?

George Flores 32:35

No, a sound is a passion, it doesn't matter what I do, but I would like to work on something that allows for I'm gonna call it infinite creativity on sound design. It's really not try to be like Batman or the Odyssey or none of that stuff. Let's just create something, somebody that would say, Okay, yeah, let's let's do this. And I've worked on a couple of productions like that, that were very good because of that. I worked on one which was called um the Taylor Files, and that was from a through a video game company, and they gave us all access to whatever sound design we wanted to do. Of course, it was the director. The director would uh yay or nay in the sound design, but that meant that I could actually use very interesting sounds like prepare pianos and very interesting sound. And then using uh techniques from you know magnetic recording and reversing, slowing down, duplicating, all that kind of stuff, you can create an entire environment that nobody's heard before. That is not really what's out there in a sound library, and that's what I think the key is for sound to be successful. Anyone can do the thing that was done yesterday. The idea is to do something that they haven't heard yet.

Advice For Beginners And AI Futures

Greg Staffa 33:58

I absolutely love your passion. How hard is it? I mean, because sound is something that isn't it isn't very sexy when we think of you know Hollywood or even just independent films, sound is not something that most people, I would assume, have the passion that you do. What would you tell someone that's looking into getting to sound? You know, how do you describe what they do and how do you kind of encourage them to find that passion that you have in it?

George Flores 34:28

Well, as you say, sound is not very sexy, and that has a lot to do also with uh how the establishment has seen some people over the years. They're not really considered artists, like I mean, they're considered laborers. In fact, sometimes we don't get even to give that credit. Like, you know, it's like hire a sound guy, you know, somebody to hold the boom. Like it's just kind of the way it is. Anything you do in life, you have to like, you have to be passionate about it, otherwise, don't do it, or do something else, or do it as a hobby or whatever. But if you're going to make your life uh sound, video editing, color correction, whatever it is, you have to like it. You have to feel your, you have to say, Oh my god, I put that footstep and it just sounds awesome. One footsteps and it sounds awesome. If you can say that, then you are not really in the right place. If you want to get into sound design because you heard you can make 150k a year, then you're in the wrong place. That's not what it's all about. It's all about what's about is to create the art that is inside you and you can put it out and you have to like it. At the same time, you can say, Oh man, that sucked. But you have to be your own, your own um your own critic of it. But most importantly, you wanna want to do it. Um, as some of my students, some of the things that you know, all the students that I teach sometimes, they'll come to me and they'll say, Oh man, how do we how do we become like you? Uh well, it's not a matter of becoming like me. First of all, I mean, you're 40 years younger than me, so I've been doing this for 40 years, so no kidding, like yes, you know, but it's not about becoming like me, it's about becoming like you because I'm gonna live here forever, and maybe I don't want to work later on. It's just how do you find something you like? And one of the things that I've noticed is most students go into it and say, I want to be a composer, or I do like post-production sound, but they don't even know what it is. So, but mostly it's composing or doing beats, that kind of stuff, because that immediately brings in big dollars, they see big dollars and and they see recognition as well, right? Where sound is just sort of a quiet art left left behind. Uh, you have to like it. If you like it, then you're all cool.

Greg Staffa 36:47

And I will say that while it's not sexy, I think if it was to disappear and the job that you do to you know be removed, uh it would be noticed. So it's one of those unsung hero type things where you're not fully loved and appreciated until you do it bad or do it wrong, and then everyone notices.

George Flores 37:09

Exactly. Like I have hundreds of films that have gone to festivals, you never hear anything. But if there's anything wrong with the sound, oh, this sucks. Like, as you say, you only hear when it's bad, right? Now, the other point that you just brought up, if he was to disappear, you know, there we are in the well, the the the whole industry, the whole world really is on a large thread of AI taking over a lot of things. Right now, there is software out there that you can uh put a piece of video and say to the software, design that for me, put the footsteps, put the gunshots, put everything, and the theme will do it for you. He will do a reasonable bad job on it without any any uh human input. And some people down the line, I'm gonna say within two years, will be using a lot of that. Um, the problem is that the consumer as a whole, not the independent artist, not the artists that I cater to, but the consumer as a whole, like the whole world, they don't care about it. And it's going to start with things like advertisements for you know insurance companies and cars and all that stuff will be done through AI very fast, very soon, because it costs you nothing, and you can do it in say, I don't know, a minute, 10 minutes, an hour, okay, 200, one hour. What this would have cost it before five, six, seven, eight minutes studio. And I don't care. The person that is watching an insurance company commercial does not care if it's AI. It doesn't matter, it doesn't care. So we are going to lose those sort of jobs in the future. Now, the odd part is that a lot of the professionals that say, oh no, don't use AI, whatever, are in fact using AI underneath. And it's not because they they say to themselves, I'm gonna go use AI and say I'm not using it. No, it's because a lot of the software that we use on a daily basis is now comes in loaded with uh additional software that is based on AI. So if you're doing something with, you know, the main video editors or so, there's plugins inside of it that will use AI and people will use it. So it's becoming more and more common. But I hope that the art of film as a tool, as an artist, will continue, and it will not be only the art of making more money by spending less and not hiring people like me.

Greg Staffa 39:56

It is becoming amazing. Uh, YouTube, the ads they have on YouTube now are all becoming AI, and it takes a moment where if you're watching it, your mind says there's something off, and you watch it a little bit more, and all of a sudden you realize that it is fake or AI. There's one that I keep on seeing an ad for where the customer is at like a DMV, and the back and forth you realize that the AI had trouble processing it, so they gave the same background to both people on this the in the DMV window. So the person behind the counter, you can see the people behind her, and the person talking has people behind her. And it's like, well, there can't be people behind both of them sitting there. One is, and so it's it's amazing, these commercials and they look great at first glance. But when you really start analyzing it, you see the flaws that AI has.

George Flores 40:58

So some of that, uh, the the solution that will happen, or the reason why this is happening a lot, is because the people using this AI in many cases are not trained people. Anybody, anybody that isn't an advertising person or whatever, any anybody can use it. Can just tell the thing to do it, type what you want, and it'll do it for you. So the new jobs that will be for somebody like me, if I wanted to do that, would become to be an AI checker operator. So what happens is a studio would create something as you're saying with the AI or whatever, and then would come to somebody like me, and I would check it to make sure that there's no double reflections and all that kind of stuff. But that's not only happening in this field, in in medical systems as well. I've got this problem, this aches, this hurts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the thing will tell you what's wrong with you. Okay, so that's fine. But now the job of the doctor is to now verify that you were told the right thing. The the doctor is no longer going to actually diagnose you themselves, they will initially go through AI and then they will validate the AI situation. Um, I just recently had to go to the doctor, and there was something like that. Um, you know, the first they call it initial assessment. But this is moving very fast. It will eventually become like that. Uh, if you take your car for uh to be fixed, the plug into a computer, and the thing and the AI will check the whole thing, give you a report, and then a technician will come and say, Okay, we gotta change, you know, whatever. So yeah.

Greg Staffa 42:35

Wow. Well, I can't believe our time has passed. George Flores, you have been an amazing person to talk to. I love hearing the passion in your voice, and your love of this is is clear, and I'm so glad to have people like you on that that don't get all the recognition and to be able to show and highlight the work that you do. Uh, it may be you know lesser known, but it's still equally as important. So I thank you for coming on and look forward to seeing what the future has for you.

George Flores 43:06

Thank you very much, sir. It was fun.